Dyson, Kenneth --- "The European Central Bank: Enlargement as Institutional Affirmation and Differentiation" [2008] ELECD 274; in Best, Edward; Christiansen, Thomas; Settembri, Pierpaolo (eds), "The Institutions of the Enlarged European Union" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Book Title: The Institutions of the Enlarged European Union

Editor(s): Best, Edward; Christiansen, Thomas; Settembri, Pierpaolo

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847203458

Section: Chapter 7

Section Title: The European Central Bank: Enlargement as Institutional Affirmation and Differentiation

Author(s): Dyson, Kenneth

Number of pages: 20

Extract:

7. The European Central Bank:
enlargement as institutional
affirmation and differentiation
Kenneth Dyson

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has been the single most import-
ant and ambitious policy project in the history of European integration. It
represents `asymmetrical' integration. Monetary policy is unified in the
European Central Bank (ECB), which manages the single currency for a
group of member states, whilst fiscal policies and economic policies to
promote growth and employment remain the responsibility of the member
states. The result is a Euro Area within the larger EU and a single mone-
tary policy that sits alongside a variety of fiscal and employment and
growth policies that are formally coordinated at the EU level. Hence the
Euro Area has been characterized as ECB-centric (Dyson 2000). A recent
empirical study shows that members of the key EU committee in economic
governance, the Economic and Financial Committee, believe that EMU
had enormously strengthened the effectiveness of the ECB and to some
extent the Euro Group of Euro Area finance ministers but substantially
weakened ECOFIN, the Council of Economic and Finance Ministers
(Dyson and Quaglia 2008). A key question is what effects EU enlargement
is having on the institutional structures and functioning of this ECB-
centric Euro Area? In addressing this question the chapter focuses logically
on the ECB in its institutional context.
The enlargement of the EU from 15 to 25 member states in 2004, and
then again to 27 in 2007, had little immediate visible effect on institutional
change in ...